U.S. Pat. No. 6,941,348 to Petry et al. (the “Active EMS patent”) is hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety for all purposes. The Active EMS patent describes an active electronic message management system that includes a real-time feedback loop where data is collected from the electronic messages on incoming connection attempts, outgoing delivery attempts, and message content analysis, and written to a data matrix.
As of May 2005, Postini, Inc., the Assignee of the present disclosure, processes more than 3 billion messages per week. Information gathered from this processing provides valuable insight into the activities on the email traffic on the Internet. Offensive email traffickers or “spammers,” having been thwarted by content-based email message filtering have begun using brute-force methods to overcome the many email message filtering products and services in existence. These brute force methods in many cases are not even so much a threat to end-users' message boxes as they are an overall burden on the servers and networks of the Internet—including routers maintained by ISPs, universities, and corporate networks. For example, in some cases spammers will send millions of random messages for the purpose of affecting the filtering parameters of content-based email filters, as those filters generally are adaptive to message traffic patterns on the Internet. These messages will accordingly not even include commercial advertisements. They will not generally be repetitive in nature, but random, and sent to random known email addresses in the spammers' databases. Since the messages will not have a known pattern, content-based email filters, which are not configured to block messages based on detecting offensive senders of email messages by source address, will generally allow these messages to pass through to users. Further, since much of such email filtering is performed at the corporate or ISP location, and sometimes as far back as the mail server for the end user or even at the users' personal email clients, this type of email filtering does nothing to reduce the level of network traffic that an ISP or corporate network must process.